The Middle East uprisings provide a teachable moment about how the media can reinvent journalism with citizen involvement
It is 10 years, almost exactly, since a website called OhMyNews was established in South Korea with the statement that it regarded "Every citizen is a reporter". Ten years on, and the relationship between the mainstream media and the non-professional press of the people is taking on a different, but perhaps even more radical shape than that which we imagined a decade ago.
If we take the example of the past few weeks of the Arab Spring, the astonishing unfolding story has made two things abundantly clear. One is that without professional journalism, democracy is unsustainable; and the other is that without a strong alliance with, and understanding of, the publishing public, professional journalism is unsustainable.
It is impossible to imagine how a story as vivid as that of Mubarak's fall in Egypt could have been told without the reporting of al-Jazeera, or the battalions of local and foreign correspondents, who worked in difficult and dangerous conditions to piece together a chaotic story. Equally, the aggregation efforts of professional journalists like NPR's Andy Carvin (@acarvin is the must read Twitter stream for many of us), allowed many of us to keep up with what local bloggers and citizens were tweeting or posting through social media links. The fuller the picture ? even if made up of a thousand fragments ? the better the story.
This rich and fast-emerging pattern of co-operation between news outlets and the publishing public represents a more mature state of play for the issue of how professional and amateur reporting fits together. The most encouraging sign for journalism, although maybe an alarming one for business managers, is that we now see dozens of journalists, who were previously constrained to operating on their own sites, posting ever more material and links to places where their audiences might be. Nick Kristof, for instance, from the New York Times, posts updates on his Facebook page which are too long for Twitter, but not complete enough for the NYT. The comments and community that gather around his posts make transparent the links between a reporter and the reception his or her work receives: 200,000 people "like" his page ? that is a pretty strong endorsement.
What journalism in its professional state is now rapidly working out is what work can be done by algorithms and automation and tools, what is better done by witnesses, and what has to be done by journalists. Journalists being those who are both held accountable by professional standards and have institutional protection ? whether it is physical, financial or legal ? to continue to apply the metaphorical shoulder to the door.
In a recent interview, one of the most influential thinkers on the network society, Manuel Castells describes how vital he sees this new relationship of non-professional analysts, witnesses and reporters with the existing corporate media:
"Large media corporations have no choice. They either ally with the internet and people's journalism or they will become marginalised and financially unsustainable. However, that alliance plays a decisive role for social change. Without al-Jazeera, there would have been no revolution in Tunisia."
The "no choice" issue is crucial. When we set up Comment is free at the Guardian in 2006, we strongly felt that inclusion of comment and analysis applied to our own work by our community was not a "nice to have", but a "must have".
In the future, the public will become ever more astute at publication, but they have other parts of their lives, too, and their depth of interest in stories will, as Anne Nelson notes, intensify for periods and then wane at other times. The job of the professional journalist is still, as ever, to report professionally, ask questions and gather the harder information and help hold power to account, but this process now and always will involve a much more visible and closer relationship with the community that supports it.
And journalism will not just be better for it, but might have a longer lifespan than many expected in 2001.
? Emily Bell is speaking at The Morningside Post's second annual conference, "Information Overload? Navigating the Age of Democratised Media", at Columbia University, New York on Friday 25 February. More details via Facebook
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/25/digital-media-social-media
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